OTTAWA — The plant at the centre of the Canada’s largest ever beef recall is back in business.

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency announced Tuesday it has reinstated the operating licence of XL Foods Inc.’s plant in Brooks, Alta., nearly a full month after the federal agency suspended it over the plant’s failure to manage E. coli risks. Tainted meat from the plant was distributed across the country and sold under the store brands of some of Canada’s largest retailers and grocers, including Costco, Sobeys and Loblaws. Sixteen people in four provinces became sick in the E. coli outbreak.

“The agency undertook a thorough assessment of food-safety controls at XL Foods Inc. That assessment is now complete,” Paul Mayers, an agency vice-president, told reporters. “Based on a full range of observation and testing, we are confident that all issues have been fully addressed.”

The facility, under new management after Edmonton-based Nilsson Brothers Inc. made a deal last week with a subsidiary of Brazil-based JBS S.A., is now ramping up to normal operations, under tougher oversight. The 430,000 sq.-ft. plant is set up to slaughter between 3,800 and 4,000 cattle daily, and 40 inspectors and six veterinarians are usually stationed there, split between two shifts.

In the short term, CFIA has assigned two additional inspectors to the facility to keep a closer eye on the company’s E. coli checks, plant sanitation and general food hygiene. In addition, CFIA will conduct more tests for E. coli beyond the company’s testing system, and hold products until all E. coli test results have been assessed. This boosted supervision will be phased out based on the company’s performance, but Mayers would not provide a timeline.

“Enhanced inspection will remain in place until we are completely confident that the company’s food safety measures are being implemented consistently, as they should under normal procedures,” said Mayers.

Problems for XL Foods began on Sept. 4 when beef trimmings from the plant tested positive for E. coli during routine CFIA testing, triggering an in-depth review of plant practices. On the same day, U.S. authorities informed CFIA of a positive E. coli test on beef trimmings from the XL Foods plant at the Montana border. The U.S. shut the border to beef from the XL Foods plant on Sept. 13, two weeks before CFIA suspended the plant’s licence to produce meat for the Canadian market at the completion of its review.

The U.S. border remains closed for now, but the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service has indicated the process to relist the plant as eligible to import to the U.S. would begin with a nod from the CFIA that the plant meets that agency’s conditions to its satisfaction.

When the CFIA is confident “the plant can consistently apply it’s food safety controls, we’ll then communicate with our colleagues in the U.S., as we have been doing throughout this situation, and only at that point will we then propose that the plant be relisted,” said Mayers.

Limited operations resumed at the plant on Oct. 11 so CFIA could see if the company’s new E. coli control plan was working as designed. None of that meat was permitted to enter the market until a full reopening. The 5,100 carcasses processed were already in the plant when it was shut down, and were tested for E. coli.

XL Foods devised a new E. coli control plan after the CFIA failed to notice during routine inspections that the plant recall had not properly implemented its own plan to control food safety risks. This fundamental gap meant the plant wasn’t managing properly its E. coli risks, including properly analysing trends among positive samples.

Pressed about how CFIA missed such a vital component of a food-safety system as part of the regular duties of its inspectors, Mayers emphasized that CFIA operates in a “continuing improvement environment, and so where an event points us to an opportunity to further strengthen the system or strengthen controls, we are not shy about requiring those to be implemented system-wide, and we’re committed to doing the same here.

“So while we operate with a high degree of diligence, we cannot provide an absolute guarantee that errors will not occur. When errors occur, we want to explore the root cause for those errors and make adjustments if necessary to prevent those roots causes being replicated in the system,” said Mayers.

I've been a Senior Writer at Postmedia News (formerly Canwest News Service) since 2003. I used to cover education, and now I report on consumer affairs (since 2008). I'm based in Ottawa, but I've lived... read more in Victoria, Halifax, Montreal and Toronto (my hometown) for school and work. I didn't plan to become a journalist, but after grad school (to study history), I thought I might want to teach, so went to teacher's college. It was a dreary experience, so I got involved at the campus student paper to get through the school year. I came out of that experience with a third university degree and a job paying less than $10,000 as news editor of The Varsity at the University of Toronto. That was in 1997. I've been writing for a living ever since.View author's profile